Cipheron on 9/7/2023 at 13:42
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
I'd like to believe that all the sites scraping Twitter are instead hammering the servers more, because they're getting errors and so, naturally, retrying repeatedly until the error goes away.
Well Twitter recently rate-limiting how many posts an account can read per day fits with that.
(
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/01/twitter-imposes-limits-on-the-number-of-tweets-users-can-read-amid-extended-outage/)
Elon Musk says the outages that lead to drastically limited post reading were a result of bot-scraping attacks. Why this is a problem now, but not months or weeks ago, he doesn't explain. It's clearly as a side-effect of something Twitter themselves did.
EDIT: Which was a gut feeling backed up by actually reading the rest of the article:
Quote:
According to a developer, however, the big bad wolf that Twitter is fighting against this week appears to be Twitter itself. A bug in Twitter's web app is sending requests to Twitter in an infinite loop.
The curb follows tens of thousands of users complaining on Saturday that Twitter was not populating their feeds with newer tweets. Instead, users were greeted with the “rate limit exceeded” error.
heywood on 11/7/2023 at 13:07
Bot scraping started soon after the WWW went live 30 years ago. Without it, the internet basically doesn't work. So that's a red herring for sure.
I don't think putting your content behind a lock is a winning strategy if you're not the one producing the content. When the number of active users means everything to your business, because they produce your content and your ad views, why would you do anything to drive them off? Even big sites like Twitter and Reddit will start to fade away if the leading search engines and emerging AI assistants aren't leading new users to them.
Besides, I thought Musk wanted Twitter to be a public square? Most of its high profile users have been utilizing the platform primarily to make public statements, knowing their content will be reachable via search and knowing the media scours Twitter for stories. But if those statements aren't public anymore because they're locked behind a login, I suspect there will be less interest in using Twitter for PR. If he keeps going like this, he's going to turn his public square into a shrinking circle jerk.
WingedKagouti on 11/7/2023 at 13:33
Quote Posted by heywood
Besides, I thought Musk wanted Twitter to be a public square?
Despite his posturing, he seemingly wanted to own Twitter so he could stamp out any type of speech he doesn't like.
d0om on 11/7/2023 at 14:17
Quote Posted by WingedKagouti
Despite his posturing, he seemingly wanted to own Twitter so he could stamp out any type of speech he doesn't like.
That fits with the Saudi government giving him several billion to help buy it. It's not an investment in Twitter, it's an investment in controlling their population.
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Starker on 11/7/2023 at 17:40
I don't think Musk really had any plans that went beyond wanting to get clout. His subsequent actions and then the reversals of some of those actions are proof of that.
First he fires a huge number of people while mocking them, saying that if they are such geniuses, then they are surely going to be needed elsewhere, but suddenly threatens to sue the company formerly known as Facebook when it actually hires these people.
mxleader on 21/7/2023 at 04:06
I tried Reddit for a while but my tiny brain can't seem to figure out how the whole thing works and I get really lost. This forum is so much simpler for my simple brain.
